Friday, November 30, 2012

Among the learned in ancient India and Greece, the emission theory
of vision was standard. That theory proposed that subtle rays were emitted by
the eyes, which met objects and illuminated them. Alcmaeon, the Greek poet,
used the example of being struck in the eye as a proof that there is a ‘fire’
in the eye: “the eye obviously has fire within, for when one is struck (this
fire) flashes out. Vision is due to the gleaming – that is to say, the
transparent character of that which (in the eye) reflects to the object. And
sight is more perfect, the greater the purity of the substance. Empedocles
believed the visual, the eidolons of the things about us, are the product of
the merger of the rays of the eyes and the rays of the things. Indian scholars
had doubts about the rays of things – if this was so, we could see in the dark –
but they, too, believed that the eye emits rays. Interestingly, the Mohists in
China, working about the same time, accepted the reception theory – that the
eye receives light rather than projects it.

All of which is a matter of cherrypicking texts on the
intellectual level. On the folk
psychological level, the notion that the eye – unlike the ear, the tongue, the
nose, the fingers – has a certain active role in the world is hard to shake
off. One stares at a person hoping that person will look up and see one – and it
happens. Or we hide our eyes not only to keep ourselves from seeing something,
but to keep that thing from happening. Perhaps it is the structure of the eye,
with a lid that closes – which makes the eye ensemble a very different receptor
set from the other senses – that gives us this primitive sense of the eye as
projector. Piaget was the first childhood researcher to mention the fact that
the child’s theory of vision is often curiously like the ancient Greek theory
of vision.

Gerald Cottrell and Jane Winer have written a series of
papers about the “extramission” theory of the eye in children and adults. One
of their more startling papers, “Fundamentally
misunderstanding visualperception”,
concerns a survey they took among college students.

“For example, we typically found extramission beliefs among
college students who were

tested after they had received instruction on sensation and perception
in introductory psychology classes, thus suggesting not only that adults were
afﬁrming extramission beliefs but that such beliefs were resistant to
education. We were confronted, then, with the likelihood that students

were emerging from basic-level psychology courses without an
understanding of one of the most important psychological processes, namely,
visual perception.”

Interestingly, in the history of ideas, it was the Arabic
natural philosophers who first overthrew the “extramission” theory. In the
West, the names to look for are Nicolas de Cusa and Kepler. That Cottrell and
Winer find college students who believe the eye emits a kind of power is, to my
mind, much more interesting evidence of the intellectual folkways of Americans
than their poll-ready responses to questions about evolution. It is absolutely
unsurprising to a Freudian to find that numbers of adults believe that the eye
has some mysterious power. Projection and the omnipotence of thought are two of
the great pillars of Freudian anthropology.

Incidentally, this is how Winer and Cottrell made their
survey:

The test most recently used to examine extramission beliefs involves
computer representations of vision (see Gregg,Winer, Cottrell, Hedman, &
Fournier, 2001; Winer, Cottrell, Kareﬁlaki, & Gregg, 1996). We typically
instructed participants that we were interested in how vision occurs, sometimes
adding that we were speciﬁcally concerned with whether anything, like rays or
waves, comes into or goes out of the eyes when people see. We then presented a
series of trials in which we simultaneously displayed on a com-puter screen
various representations of vision that involved different combinations of input
and output. The participants then indicated which representation they thought depicted
how or why people see.” Among the choices was pure reception – the correct
choice, pure extramission, and a mix in which the eye bounces back information
to the object. Amazingly 40 to 60 percent of college students chose either pure
extramission or the idea of the eye bouncing back information on the object.

Intellectually, of course, I am down with Kepler and crewe.
But life is lived on a level of pure superstition as well. Especially when you
are raising a baby. Thus, I have found myself closing my eyes when shushing
Adam, as though my eye rays were keeping him up. Or as though some esp mimicry
action would work, where pure shushing doesn’t. Of course, it is true that
infants latch onto faces, but I close my eyes sometimes even when he is not
looking me in the face.

On the level of my psychopathological life, the eye, the
gaze, the stare, has a power that no other sensory state has. I do not believe
that I can change sound through my ear, but the thought creeps in that I can
change sight through my eye. I imagine that me – and forty to sixty percent of college students – are not alone. What car
driver has not decided to stare and point at a red light, willing it green, at
some point in his or her driving career? And yet where could this idea possibly
come from? I can’t imagine a similar thought about smell, hearing, or touch.

Of course, what other sense is so involved in our waking,
doing, communicating, having sex, entertaining lives? Aldous Huxley’s feelies –
in which touch would enter our waking world with the power of sight –
unfortunately has never been realized. Most of our working life is utterly
indifferent to touch – and our concern with smell is mostly that there not be
any. But the eye retains its mysterious, mesmerizing symbolic power over us.

All of which will make playing peekaboo with Adam when he is
a year older an interesting philosophical exercise, no?

Wednesday, November 28, 2012

“Microscopic
disorder (entropy) of a system and its surroundings (all of the relevant
universe) does not spontaneously decrease.|” This is one of the definitions of
Entropy. It is also the hope and salvation of the parent, facing the crying
baby. Patience must ride entropy over a few rough spots, and if you hum or make
shushing sounds while this is happening, all the better.

Entropy,
of course, implies order. And order implies a certain form of vision. In Rudolf
Arnheim’s Art and Entropy, he takes shuffling cards as a double-sided act – on the
one hand, increasing the disorder in a pack of cards, and on the other hand,
equalizing the chances of the players – which of course is an imperative that
only makes sense in terms of the order of the game.

“This
will become clearer if I refer to another common model for the increase of
entropy, namely shuffling. The usual interpretation of this operation is thatby shuffling,
say, a deck of cards one converts an initial order into a reasonably perfect
disorder. This, however, can be maintained only if any particular initial
sequence of cards in the deck is considered an order and if the purpose of the
shuf_ing operation is ignored. Actually,

of
course, the deck is shuf_ed because all players are to have the chance of
receiving a comparable assortment of cards. To this end, shuffling, by aiming
at a random sequence, is meant to create a homogeneous distribution of the
various kinds of cards throughout the deck. This homogeneity is the order
demanded by the purpose of the operation. To be sure, it is a low level of
order and, in fact, a limiting case of order because the only structural
condition it fulfills is that a sufficiently equal distribution shall prevail
throughout the sequence.|”

In
other words, disorder can actually be the ruse of order. This is at the heart
of the artistic instinct. Perhaps something like this is also happening when I
take Adam up and repeat something to him over and over while walking and
rocking him. Sometimes, this work. I repeat tout va bien so often that even to
me, the phrase becomes sheer comforting sound. Adam – sometimes – ceases to
cry, and begins to look around him. Or to burble. What I am aiming at, though,
is that glassy look and the heavy eyelid. In effect, I am in the process of
shuffling, of transiting between one order and the other.

At
other times, this doesn’t work at all. I will say for Adam that he is, on the
whole, a wise babe, and if he is crying or awake, there is a reason for it.
Sometimes, however, the reason is simply that he has been crying or has been
awake. At these points, the lapse into disorder is hard to contain. The ruses
fail. However, eventually Adam will sleep, and so will I. It is simply a question
of time. Adam’s strength, here, is that the question of time is a lot different
for him than for me. For me, every day that passes is in proportion to what now
seems like a mountainous sum of days. For Adam, every day that passes is in a
very sensible proportion to the amount of time he has been scanning the planet –
around five weeks, or 35 days. Thus, the minute is a huger and more monumental
thing to his instincts than to mine. He has more riding, or so he thinks, on
the minute. My strength is that, when I wrest myself from the tedious hurry of the
screen or the deadline, I can look back and see that I’ve never really been
hurt by taking more time to do things. Thrust into the mechanical world where
every contact is measured, the traffic is dangerous, the work is relative to
inflexible turnaround times, I am aware – especially holding Adam – that this
world is essentially exterior to me.

Tuesday, November 27, 2012

Hendrick Herzberg at the
New Yorker had the cleverest idea. Why not apply the Kubler Ross stages of grief to the Romney
defeat? I don’t know why nobody else has ever thought of this.

“… the House. The Republicans will have seven or eight fewer
seats in that body, but hold it they did, and this fact is what those among
them who are stuck at Stage 1 of Mme. Kübler-Ross’s five-stage topography of
grief (“Denial”), and even a few who are tentatively assaying Stage 3
(“Bargaining”), are clinging to. (Talk radio is permanently tuned to Stage 2,
“Anger,” and Stage 4, “Depression,” hangs heavy.) In the view of these
Republicans, the election was a tie; and on the legitimacy of their most cherished
goal—keeping rich folks’ taxes at their current historic lows…”

Meanwhile,
Will Oremus at Slate had the cleverest idea ever to brighten that mag: why not apply the Kubler Ross stages of
grief to the Fox News perception of the Romney defeat? I can’t believe nobody
ever thought of this!

In Fox News' election coverage Tuesday
night, there was little pretense of fairness or balance. What there was, from
the start, was a glum tone that turned downright funereal by the time Mitt
Romney finally conceded, near 1 a.m. To watch the network's anchors and guests
work through the dawning realization that their candidate was doomed was to
witness a textbook case of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross'sfive stages
of grief.

Meanwhile, in the Guardian,Richard Adams and Tim McCarthy had the brilliant idea of comparing the
conservative reaction to the Election to – Kubler Ross’s five stages of grief!
I don’t know where these pundits get their ideas, but isn’t that just brilliant
and unexpected?

The odds
were never with us historically. It has nothing to do with an embrace of one
world view or rejection of another. It is just damn hard to beat an incumbent
President who is raking in millions and laying a ground work for re-election
while your side is fighting it out in a primary.That's like wandering
around saying "I'm fine, honestly."

Meanwhile the RedState site itself seems to at stage two”

The NYT’ is unfortunately behind the curve this cycle in brilliantly and unexpectedly pairing Kubler Ross and the election. Perhaps this is because
Frank Rich, in 2008, was already using Kubler Ross to talk about the
Republicans. Or perhaps it is because in the analysis of the 2010 defeat by the
Democrats, political reporter Henry Alford compared the Democratic reaction to…
Kubler Ross!

Then of course there is Jordan Bloom at the
American Conservative, who analysed the GOP reactionto their loss in terms of … Kubler-Ross! The
Daily Kos thread which analyzed the GOP loss in terms of… Kubler-Ross! And the
columnist for the Albany Union-Leader who analyzes the GOP loss in terms of…
Kubler Ross!

This collection almost makes me think –
almost! – that we have about done to death the comparison with Kubler-Ross’s
stages of grief and elections. And having done it to death, are we going to
grieve?

Perhaps. My grief will take the form of
wondering if there is anything – burning the eggs, missing your bus – that can’t
be subsumed into the Kubler-Ross grieving process. And whether that process
with its supposed order cherrypicks reactions to create a pseudo-universal.

But I wouldn’t want to knock the sheer
genius of the political analysis we have had during this election cycle. That
would be anger and denial, and I won’t do that!

About Me

MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Roger Gathman was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover
ice. Or rather, to discover the profit making potential of selling bags of ice to picnicking Atlantans, the most glorious of the old man's Get Rich schemes, the one that devoured the most energy, the one that seemed so rational for a time, the one that, like all the others - the farm, the housebuilding business, the plastic sign business, chimney cleaning, well drilling, candy machine renting - was drawn by an inexorable black hole that opened up between skill and lack of business sense, imagination and macro-economics, to blow a huge hole in the family savings account. But before discovering the ice machine at 12, Roger had discovered many other things - for instance, he had a distinct memory of learning how to tie his shoes. It was in the big colonial, a house in the Syracuse metro area that had been built to sell and that stubbornly wouldn't - hence, the family had moved into it. He remembered bending over the shoes, he remembered that clumsy feeling in his hands - clumsiness, for the first time, had a habitation, it was made up of this obscure machine, the shoe, and it presaged a lifetime of struggle with machine after machine.